16
Fourteen ninety-nine changed everything.
It transformed Louis XII’s place in the world. His effortless conquest of the great duchy of Milan elevated him, seemingly overnight, from a kind of political abstraction, a fearsome but remote potential threat, into the master of northern Italy. Suddenly he wasthepower that no one north of Naples could dare defy.
His liking for the bold young man he had made duke of Valentinois, and his appreciation of how much trouble Pope Alexander had spared him by not opposing his incursion into Italy, transformed Louis in another way as well. He became—within limits defined by his perception of his own strategic interests—a willing patron of the Borgias. This in turn transformed the pope’s position, giving him more freedom of action than he had previously known. That freedom, as things turned out, would be used mainly for Cesare’s benefit, as he pursued his dreams of greatness.
For Alexander and Cesare alike, the next step was obvious. The time had come for a new offensive against the warlords of the Papal States, with Cesare in command this time. For Alexander, removing or at least taming the warlords was the only way of achieving control of the Church’s domains, a goal that had eluded his predecessors for centuries. Cesare’s ultimate objective could scarcely have been more ambitious without bringing his sanity into question. It was to carve out of the Papal States, for himself, a principality substantial enough to place him among the great men of Italy—not just to become a petty tyrant ruling over one or two small cities like Caterina Sforza or Vitellozzo Vitelli, but to assemble a state on an equal level with the Urbino of the Montefeltri and the Ferrara of the Este, conceivably with Florence or even Milan and Venice.
What made this dream feasible was Louis of France’s presence in northern Italy and his courting of the Borgias, his willingness to trade his support for theirs. This gave Rome a strength—albeit a largely borrowed strength—that it had barely possessed since the time, seven hundred years before, when Charlemagne and his father had made themselves masters of Italy and shared their conquests with the popes of the time. As for the fact that, to become a legitimate ruler in the Papal States, Cesare would have to accept subordinate status as a vassal of the pope, there was so little reason to object that it didn’t matter. Even the kings of Naples were papal vassals, and they had rarely been inconvenienced as a result.
Alexander and Cesare made no move until Louis was comfortably settled in the north of Italy and therefore in a relaxed and magnanimous frame of mind, at which point they secured his approval of their plans and were able to start making things happen. They made them happen quickly. In November, barely a month after Louis’s triumphal entry into Milan, Alexander made a fast grab at some low-hanging fruit, seizing the lands and castles of the Gaetani, a family considerably less powerful than the Orsini or the Colonna. The Gaetani holdings lay along the frontier where the Papal States abutted Naples and had considerable strategic value because the main highway connecting Rome and Naples ran through them. Though Alexander’s grounds for declaring them forfeit were unarguably sound—the Gaetani had allied themselves with Naples when Rome was at odds with Ferrante, thereby failing in a fundamental feudal obligation—such offenses had been routine among the vicars of the Papal States much longer than anyone could remember. Only the support of the French king made it possible for him to proceed. Without that support, without the fact that everyone knew of that support, other and more powerful clans almost certainly would have come to the defense of the Gaetani. Don Fadrique of Naples would likely have intervened as well.
The most surprising aspect of the attack on the Gaetani was not the fact that Alexander attempted it but his way of disposing of the seized properties. He sold them, and to, of all people, Lucrezia Borgia. She by this time was reunited with her husband, had just weeks before given birth to a son they named Rodrigo, and in the aftermath of her good performance at Spoleto was now in charge of the papal city of Nepi as well. Where she obtained the purchase price of eighty thousand ducats is unknown; possibly it was given to her out of the pontifical treasury, which if true made the transaction not a sale at all but a swindle. The whole affair is in any case another example of the extent to which restoring the power of the papacy and advancing the fortunes of his family had come to be intertwined not only in the pope’s thinking but in his actions. The tangle was probably inherent in the situation. A conquest of the Papal States in the pope’s name would be an assertion of the authority of Rome, no less if done by Cesare than by anyone else. And, it being necessary to entrust the management of the Papal States to some vicar, who better than Cesare?
Almost simultaneously with Alexander’s move against the Gaetani, Cesare embarked upon his new career as a soldier, bidding farewell to Louis XII and riding out of Milan at the head of a force of eighteen hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry brightly caparisoned in the red and yellow colors of the Borgias. Most of this force was made up of Swiss and Gascon mercenaries on loan from the king, all of them under the direct command of the Frenchman Yves d’Alègre. It was Alexander’s reward for his support of the Milan campaign, and it was Cesare’s to use—more or less—in whatever way he wished. Thus he found himself with the means to invade the Romagna and begin expelling the rulers of its numerous, mostly small city-states. Strategically the Romagna was a sensible choice: in the shadow of Milan and therefore within easy reach of the French king’s protection, far enough from Naples not to heighten the alarm that had been felt there when Alexander attacked the Gaetani.
Alexander had laid the groundwork for Cesare’s offensive, his impresa, back in July, with his bull excommunicating the Romagna’s leading lords. Nothing remained now but to enforce the bull and to do so in a way that was acceptable to the French and did not trigger a countermove by Venice, the only other state both close enough to the Romagna to have a real stake in its future and strong enough to make trouble. These considerations decided Cesare’s selection of his first targets: the little cities of Imola and Forlì on the Via Emilia, the ancient Roman road that runs with scarcely more than an occasional gentle curve from Bologna down to the Adriatic coast. Imola and Forlì were an obvious choice because they were ruled, in the name of her eldest son, by Caterina Sforza, whom the events of 1499 had left utterly isolated. Louis XII had no possible interest in protecting a woman who was not only a Sforza, a niece of Ludovico il Moro, but had helped her uncle to recruit troops in the Romagna as he tried to prepare for the French invasion. When asked to include Caterina in his new alliance with Florence, Louis ingenuously replied that he could not possibly intrude into the pope’s affairs in such a way. It was an empty excuse, but the king’s position was so strong that he had no need to make himself believable.
Nor would Venice grieve to see Caterina destroyed. A year earlier, when Venetian troops set out to cross the Romagna at the start of a campaign aimed at making Florence a satellite of Venice, Caterina had been alone in offering resistance. She did so with such ferocious determination that the invaders, hampered by their war with the Turks, were obliged to return home. Now, in 1500, she was not only Venice’s enemy in her own right but also the chosen enemy of Venice’s sole important friend, Rome. Because of the Turkish threat, the Venetians could hardly have considered trying to save Caterina even had they been inclined to do so, which they emphatically were not. They had earlier annoyed Alexander by warning him that they would brook no interference with their near neighbor Ercole d’Este, whose duchy of Ferrara could have been a rich prize and potentially an ideal base for Cesare. They could not have been less interested in offending him further by interfering with Cesare’s plans.
Even a friendless virago was a dangerous enemy, however. Since the last time we encountered her—in 1488, the year she outwitted and annihilated the murderers of her husband Girolamo Riario—Caterina had made herself as hated and feared as any warlord in Italy. She was violent, ruthless, and capable of almost insane cruelty. At age thirty-six she was still blond and beautiful, though not as slim as she had been in her youth, had been widowed three times, and was the mother of five sons and a daughter by Riario, a sixth son by her second husband Giacomo Feo, and a seventh by her third husband, an obscure member of the Medici family. Feo like Riario had been murdered, again deservedly so, and this time in taking revenge Caterina had not only wiped out the killers but had had their wives and children—including small children—tortured and executed. Though she had added considerably to Pope Alexander’s troubles at the time of the first French invasion by allying herself with her cousins in Milan and thus with Charles VIII, this had not prevented the pontiff from later proposing a marriage of her eldest son and heir, Ottaviano Riario, to Lucrezia. Caterina had declined; such a union could have made it difficult for her to continue ruling Imola and Forlì in the ineffectual Ottaviano’s name.
Caterina’s great problem, as Cesare’s assault force approached, was that there was only one of her and she had two cities to defend. She barricaded herself inside the rocca at Forlì, leaving Imola under the command of a condottiere named Dionigi di Naldi. In Caterina’s absence Imola proved impossible to hold, its inhabitants having suffered far too much at the hands of Caterina and her husbands to be willing to sacrifice anything on her behalf. Di Naldi and his troops withdrew into Imola’s rocca, but when Cesare and d’Alègre arrived and put on a demonstration of what their artillery could do to brickwork battlements, the fight was over. Di Naldi not only opened the fortress’s gates but joined Cesare’s army. It was agreed, as part of the surrender terms, that d’Alègre’s mercenaries would not be allowed inside the town walls of Imola. This proved to be unenforceable, assuming that the French commander made any attempt to enforce it, and the consequences were horrific: pillaging and rapine of the kind that the soldiers of northern Europe regarded as their right but that few Italians then living had ever experienced.
At Forlì, in the beginning, things unfolded much as they had at Imola. The townsfolk, evidently unaware of what had happened to their neighbors, welcomed the invaders while Caterina watched from the ramparts of her fortress. This time, however, Cesare made certain that the French troops were kept away from the civilians. And this time, Caterina Sforza being in personal command of the defenses, there would be no surrender. Having sent her children off to the safety of Florence, Caterina settled in for a fight to the finish, showing her contempt for the people who had been her subjects for the previous twenty years by bombarding their homes with stone cannonballs. “Should I have to perish,” she is supposed to have said, “I want to perish like a man.” Any doubts about whether it was going to be a long, hard siege were laid to rest when Caterina, to spread the general misery, broke open Forlì’s irrigation dams. The Romagna landscape being little less flat than a billiard table, she thereby succeeded in flooding both the town and the countryside surrounding and caused Cesare’s siege machinery to bog down in mud. At about this same time, Caterina or someone associated with her attempted to assassinate the pope at long distance, with an early experiment in chemical warfare. A message was sent to him wrapped either in poison or (depending on which version of the story is preferred) in fabric worn by a victim of the plague. The experiment failed and no harm was done aside from a further heightening, if such a thing was possible, of the general hostility.
Caterina hung on doggedly through three brutal weeks as ball after ball smashed into the walls of her rocca, which finally began to develop large cracks. Her spirits must have soared at reports that her uncle Ludovico il Moro was coming down out of the Alps at the head of an army, intent upon retaking Milan. The reports were true; the gold with which he had earlier fled Milan had provided Ludovico with ample funds with which to hire and equip a substantial body of Swiss mercenaries. If he moved quickly enough and was at all successful, Louis XII would be forced to recall his troops from the Romagna. Cesare would have no choice but to break off his siege.
Things did not work out that way. On January 12 Cesare’s bombardment finally bore fruit, opening a sizable hole in one of the walls of Caterina’s stronghold and allowing d’Alègre’s infantry to pour through. The hand-to-hand combat that followed ended with Caterina, seeing that defeat had become inevitable, attempting to commit suicide by blowing up her gunpowder magazine. A defective fuse foiled that effort, and she was taken prisoner by the French, her fortress falling into Cesare’s hands. He had to pay d’Alègre to hand Caterina herself over, regarding her as far too dangerous to be left in anyone’s custody but his own. Soon after, when he set off with his troops for his next objective, Giovanni Sforza’s city of Pesaro, he took his captive with him. By not only defeating the famed virago but stripping her of her cities, he had catapulted himself into first place among the soldiers of Italy. Stories circulated of how he repeatedly raped Caterina after she was in his custody, and though they enhanced his reputation as an enemy to be feared, they are of dubious provenance. It is just as plausible that Caterina, who in the course of her career had more lovers than husbands, made her person available to Cesare in hopes of gaining an advantage. It is no less possible that the two did not become intimately involved at all.
Cesare was en route to Pesaro, which had already been abandoned by a frightened Giovanni Sforza, when a courier came galloping in with instructions for Yves d’Alègre to quick-march his troops back to Milan. Il Moro had reentered his old capital to the welcoming shouts of his former subjects, who after a taste of French occupation had decided—much like the Neapolitans in the time of Charles VIII—that the Sforzas were not so intolerable after all. D’Alègre’s men were to become part of the force that Louis XII was assembling in hope of saving his position. The speed of this reversal made Louis’s invasion seem as empty an achievement as his predecessor’s had been. It resurrected old questions about how wise the pope had been in allying Rome with France.
The Sforza resurgence, however, was short-lived. In March, with a decisive battle apparently impending, Il Moro found himself abandoned to the mercy of his enemies. The Swiss mercenaries who had made possible his return to Italy, called upon to attack the Swiss in the employ of King Louis, declared that doing so was out of the question. They turned on their heels and departed, leaving Ludovico face-to-face with his enemies without an army at his back. He became a prisoner, as did his brother Cardinal Ascanio. Together they were taken away to France, where Ludovico would remain in confinement for the rest of his life. Louis XII took custody of the child who would have been duke of Milan if not for Ludovico’s usurpation: the still only nine-year-old Francesco Sforza, grandson of Il Moro’s late brother the psychopath Galeazzo Maria. No doubt to keep him from producing more claimants to the ducal title, the boy was consigned to the Church and to a comfortable future as abbot of a French monastery of no particular importance.
The withdrawal of d’Alègre’s troops had brought Cesare’s first impresa to an unexpected, and from his perspective a deplorably premature, end. He had to abandon the march on Pesaro. Leaving Imola and Forlì in the firm hands of a longtime associate, a ruthlessly tough veteran of the Spanish reconquista named Ramiro de Lorqua, he set out for Rome. Pope Alexander, who had ordered bonfires lit all around Rome upon learning of the capture of Forlì, now outdid himself, arranging an extravagant public celebration of Cesare’s arrival and modeling it on the “triumphs” with which the emperors of old had marked the return of conquerors. On February 25 the whole city was turned out: cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and Rome’s noble families stood waiting to cheer as Cesare passed through the Porta del Popolo at the head of his shrunken and weary army. With him, a trophy on display, was Caterina Sforza. After refusing to sign away her son’s rights to Forlì and Imola, she was locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where, so the story goes, her hair quickly turned white.
The pope conferred on Cesare the Golden Rose, an ancient honor usually reserved for royalty, and the coveted title gonfaloniere or standard-bearer of the Church, previously held by such masters of the military arts as Francesco Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro as well as by Cesare’s distinctly less deserving brother Juan.
Louis XII being now back in control of Milan and eager to demonstrate his generosity to faithful friends, Cesare was almost immediately able to begin planning a second Romagna campaign. Though still dependent on the king’s assistance, he was growing wary of it, having experienced at first hand how viciously uncontrollable France’s mercenaries could be and how quickly they could be withdrawn when Louis decided that he needed them elsewhere. Cesare began looking to the Vatican for more of the money he needed. With Alexander’s skeptical acquiescence—though the pope definitely wanted control of the Papal States, he was less confident than Cesare that the Romagna was the place to start and less certain that trading friendship with Spain for friendship with France made strategic sense—Cesare began drawing from the pontifical treasury sums that in time would become nearly insupportable.
For the moment, fortunately for Cesare, the papal coffers were exceptionally full, the reforms introduced by Alexander having by this time begun to produce both increased revenues and substantial savings. The revenues of the alum mines at Tolfa were continuing to accumulate also, and Alexander had created a cash bonanza by declaring 1500 a jubilee year and promising special indulgences that were drawing pilgrims to Rome by the tens of thousands. Though he cannot be accused of neglecting other needs—in response to the Turkish threat Alexander was sending forty thousand ducats a year to the king of Hungary and paying for the construction and equipping of fifteen warships at Venice—good management and good luck were providing him with the means to help Cesare as well.
For Cesare especially, but for all the young Borgias, the early summer of 1500 was a time for basking in good fortune. Alexander issued a bull appointing Cesare vicar—lord in the pope’s name—of Imola and Forlì. News arrived from France that Cesare’s bride, Charlotte d’Albret, was expecting his child. There is no explanation of why Charlotte failed to join her husband in Italy. Louis XII may have found it advisable to keep her in his custody, if not quite as a hostage then at least as an enhancement of his leverage over the Borgias. As for Cesare himself, it was not in his nature to pine for any woman; the most famously beautiful courtesan in Rome, a Florentine named Fiammetta, had by this time become his principal mistress. On June 24, as part of the Vatican’s celebration of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, he put on a display of his bullfighting skills in the piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica, killing five bulls from horseback and a sixth on foot, severing the head of the last with a single blow of his sword. It should not be forgotten that even at this point, recognized though he already was as the most fearsome Italian alive and a rising political force in his own right, Cesare was not yet twenty-five years old. His most colorful and extravagant actions are generally best understood as expressions of sheer animal exuberance—the overflowing vitality of a gifted, ambitious, energetic, and burningly impatient young man.
The summer idyll of 1500 came to an abrupt and frightening end on the night of July 15, a date that marks the beginning of another of the darkest Borgia mysteries. Lucrezia and the duke of Bisceglie had returned to Rome from Nepi, and that night, upon departing the papal palace after dinner, Bisceglie was set upon by a gang of armed men. Whether they intended to kill him or carry him away is not known, but Bisceglie resisted at sword’s point and was gravely injured in the ensuing fight. The attackers fled when palace guards heard the commotion and opened the gates. At Alexander’s instructions Bisceglie was carried to a room on the top floor of the new part of the papal palace known today as the Borgia Tower, and a round-the-clock guard was posted. Over the next five weeks, under the care of the pope’s own physicians and with Lucrezia and Sancia serving as nurses and guardians, he gradually regained his strength.
Rome boiled with speculation about whose work the attack had been, and why. This time Cesare came under suspicion almost immediately. Apparently there had been bad blood between him and Bisceglie; this would have been nearly unavoidable as Cesare and Alexander allowed their old friendship with Naples and Spain to cool and drew close to France instead. The grapevine continued to hum with whispers about how, with Louis XII’s army likely to be moving on Naples soon, Bisceglie’s connection to the Borgias had become tiresomely inconvenient. Learning of this talk, Cesare declared cryptically that “I did not wound the duke, but if I had it would have been no more than he deserved.” Evidently Bisceglie himself believed Cesare to be guilty, though suspicion also focused, as at the time of Juan Borgia’s murder, on the Orsini. It was said that Bisceglie, in league with his family’s longtime allies the Colonna, had been plotting against the Orsini. This is no less plausible than any number of rival theories, including the one that had Cesare ordering the attack out of fear that Lucrezia’s happy marriage, and Alexander’s devotion to Lucrezia, would deter the pontiff from breaking with Naples. Or the suggestion that it was Bisceglie who had blocked Cesare from making Carlotta of Naples his wife, thereby incurring his hatred.
What happened next was even more shocking but considerably less mysterious. On August 18 Lucrezia, Sancia, and Bisceglie’s visiting mother briefly left the convalescing duke alone, either to attend to some matter of household business or because someone—possibly Cesare—had called them away. Upon returning and finding the door blocked by armed men, the women ran to the pope for help. When at last they were admitted to Bisceglie’s bedchamber, they found him dead, strangled, it would be said, by a Spanish soldier named Miguel de Corella—Michelotto to the Italians, a longtime friend of Cesare’s but just now coming to prominence as his most trusted and devoted lieutenant. No reason has ever emerged for thinking this account of the crime to be untrue. Questions, however, remain. Why would Cesare have been so open in arranging the murder, in broad daylight and without any attempt at secrecy, of the husband of the sister whom, as his subsequent conduct would make it impossible to doubt, he loved more than anyone else? And does his responsibility for the murder mean that he must also have been responsible for the night attack on Bisceglie more than a month earlier?
The search for answers has always been impeded by rumor and uncertainty—by reports, for example, that not long before the murder Bisceglie had gone for a walk in the papal gardens, seen the brother-in-law who he believed had tried to have him butchered, fired off a bolt from a crossbow in an impulsive attempt at revenge, and sent Cesare into a murderous rage by doing so. Among students of the Borgia story are some who find it impossible to believe that Cesare had anything to do with the first attempt on Bisceglie’s life, others who find it impossible to believe that he did not. As for the strangling, here it is depicted as a cold-blooded act of political calculation, there as a crime of blind passion. When everything known about Cesare is taken into account, it would appear more characteristic of him to have killed for a purpose than to have been carried away by a momentary surge of wrath. Still, as noted earlier, he was young and capable of impulsive behavior.
The deepest mystery of all, assuming as we must that Cesare did have Bisceglie killed, is how his relationship with Lucrezia was not destroyed. If we could find the answer to that, it would take us to the heart of a connection that bound brother tightly to sister as long as both remained alive. The intensity of that connection was undoubtedly obvious to all who observed the two together and helps to explain why the allegations of incest that a bitter Giovanni Sforza first muttered when his marriage to Lucrezia was being dissolved took root and grew into a centuries-old legend of international reach.
Whatever the answers to these questions, regardless of whether Cesare at any point had second thoughts or felt a pang of remorse (neither thing is easily imagined), the murder and the furor that followed did nothing to diminish his impatience to return to action. He was poised to respond when, just days after Bisceglie’s body was laid to rest, it became known that preparations for Louis XII’s move on Naples were under way at last. This put a whole new train of events in motion. Alexander and Cesare alike were quick to see that the situation was ripe for exploitation. It was Cesare, mainly, who set out to do the exploiting, pulling an uncertain pope along in his wake.
He had two great advantages in this situation. The first was the papal soldiery, which if added to King Louis’s own troops would increase the size of the French army by at least a third. If used to resist Louis’s advance, on the other hand, it could be a serious problem. The other was the power of the pope to approve, or withhold approval of, Louis’s claim to the Neapolitan crown. Without this, even if he succeeded in taking Naples by force, Louis like Charles before him would be a usurper with no proper grounds for demanding the loyalty of the people of Naples or recognition by the other Italian states.
The king’s need for the Borgias was therefore obvious enough, and his personal attachment to Cesare sufficiently well known, to have immediate impact. It caused the Venetians, eager to demonstrate their willingness to be cooperative, to confer on Cesare the honorary title gentiluomo di Venezi. In doing this they signaled that they had no intention of defending Pesaro, Rimini, or Faenza—all of them longtime Venetian protectorates—if Cesare moved against them. Just twelve days later, less than a week after the Bisceglie murder, a team of French commissioners arrived in Rome to lay out the terms on which Cesare could launch his next impresa and again receive French support. Louis was generous, offering Cesare the use of 7,700 fighting men and approving his plan to expand his signory, his lordship, across much or possibly all of the Romagna.
The campaign that Cesare was preparing was going to be hellishly expensive—all the more so because he had made it his policy, from the point at which he first became a commander of troops, not only to pay and equip his men well but also—what was most unusual—always to pay them on time. Pope Alexander’s main role was simply to cover the costs—to funnel from the papal treasury the sums required to keep Cesare supplied with thousands of well-trained, well-equipped, and satisfied professional fighters. It is commonly said that in late September the pope gave his income a onetime boost of 120,000 ducats by selling, with the terms negotiated by Cesare, twelve seats in the College of Cardinals. In fact only ten cardinals were appointed at that time, and their identities make it doubtful that fund-raising was the primary reason for their promotion. Three of the ten were Spaniards, among them one of the Borgia Lanzols and a former teacher of Cesare’s. Among the six Italians were Alexander’s physician and a brother of the Gian Giacomo Trivulzio who as commander of Louis XII’s attack force had driven Ludovico Sforza out of Milan. Like the three appointments of six months earlier, which had conferred red hats on two Spaniards and a brother of Cesare’s wife, most of these men were more capable of tightening Borgia control over the Sacred College and winning favor with the kings of France and Spain than of paying great sums for their new rank. It is clear in any case that Cesare was left free to select the new cardinals, and that his choices, even if not made for cash, had more to do with politics than with the merits of the individuals so favored. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, packing the college with cronies.
The ease with which Cesare’s slate of nominees was approved by the College of Cardinals, normally so opposed to attempts to increase its membership, shows how powerful he now was politically, and perhaps how feared. The same thing was shown again when emissaries arrived from the Romagnese city of Cesena and two of its neighboring towns and meekly begged Cesare to condescend to become their lord, their signore. The populations of these places were in effect giving themselves to him, seeking to spare themselves unpleasantness or worse by saving him the trouble of having to use force. In granting their petitions, Cesare substantially strengthened his position in the region between Bologna and the Adriatic coast without so much as leaving Rome.
Further gains came quickly and with almost equal ease. When on October 2 Cesare embarked on his second impresa, he marched out of Rome at the head of an army of some ten thousand men. Waiting to join him in the Romagna was a force three-quarters that size provided by Louis XII. This was a terrifyingly large number of troops by the standards of the time, and Cesare made himself all the more frightening by telling no one what he intended to do. Florence felt threatened, all the more so because a delegation it had sent to Louis XII’s court—one of its members was a young civil servant named Niccolò Macchiavelli—had thus far not succeeded in securing either an alliance or assurances of protection. Even Bologna with all its wealth and power felt threatened, as did such comparatively minor states as Siena and Mantua. Those even smaller were engaged in a desperate search for potent allies and finding distressingly few. The great duchy of Milan, which under the Sforzas would have been happy to bring its neighbors under its protection in hope of turning them into dependencies, was now an instrument of France and therefore part of the threat. Venice, still mired in its war with the Turks, could not afford to offend, never mind resist, France and Rome combined.
Cesare moved quickly and had startling success. His despised former brother-in-law Giovanni Sforza, alone since the fall of his cousins Ludovico il Moro and Caterina and mindful that nothing could induce his resentful subjects to risk themselves on his behalf, fled Pesaro again. He offered to sell the city to Venice and learned that Venice was not interested at any price. It was much the same with Rimini, twenty miles farther up the coast: Roberto Malatesta’s son Pandolfo departed in haste after finding it impossible to rally a defense. When a bishop sent by Cesare arrived to demand Rimini’s submission, its citizens hurried to welcome him.
The only place to offer resistance was Faenza, a small but thriving city midway between Caterina Sforza’s former strongholds of Imola and Forlì. Its location made it a prize that Cesare needed to complete his control of the Via Emilia. Long the domain of the Manfredi family, Faenza in 1500 had as its lord the eighteen-year-old Astorre Manfredi, a charismatic figure who spurned the demands of Cesare’s envoys and was supported by the people of the town. Cesare, whose capture of Pesaro had added twenty cannons to his already considerable strength in artillery, brought Faenza under siege on November 10. A long, hard struggle appeared to be in the offing, but Cesare had sufficient resources to attack other targets while proceeding with the tedious business of reducing Faenza’srocca to rubble.
On November 11, however, another stunning development rearranged the political landscape yet again. Those two old rivals Ferdinand of Spain and Louis of France, already bound together in a fragile truce of convenience, now agreed via the Treaty of Granada to divide the kingdom of Naples between them. Louis was to get Il Regno’s northern provinces including the capital city and with it the Neapolitan crown. Ferdinand’s share for turning on his cousin Don Fadrique and recognizing Louis’s right to Milan would be the southern provinces of Apulia and Calabria. It was a sensible enough arrangement as far as it went. Louis could march his troops down the peninsula from Milan without having to set foot on territory claimed by Spain. Ferdinand would be able to move troops into his part of the sundered kingdom from nearby Sicily, again without risking collision with his new partner in crime. Each got the satisfaction of knowing that he would soon be master of half of Naples without having to fight the other.
Much like the earlier arrangement by which France and Venice agreed to share Milan’s holdings on the Lombard Plain but on a larger scale, this deal created a combination so overwhelmingly powerful that all the states of Italy could have no hope of resisting it even if they somehow managed to unite. It removed any possibility that Naples—and Italy—might be saved by playing the two great powers off against each other. Thus it stripped Alexander of any lingering hope of impeding Louis as he had earlier helped to undo Charles VIII. Under these new circumstances a refusal to recognize Louis as king of Naples would have been not only an empty gesture but a potentially suicidal one. The only hope for an autonomous Italy lay in the inherent instability of the alliance. It required two proud, ambitious, and shrewd monarchs, hardened cynics who had never trusted each other and were obviously not going to begin doing so now, to share a great prize that neither really thought he should have to share with anyone. But all this was going to take time to play itself out. In the near term Naples as an independent state was doomed, and no one could do anything to save it.
The certainty that he would soon be on his way to Naples focused Louis XII’s attention on central Italy with new intensity. It brought home to him the importance of securing the hundreds of miles separating Milan from Naples—miles over which he was going to have to move his troops. Obviously he wanted the states that lay along his path to be incapable of opposing him if not positively friendly, and the surest way to achieve that was to make them dependent. This required keeping any of them from becoming strong enough to act independently, and all of them divided against one another. From this point forward, these were the considerations that shaped the French king’s dealings with the Borgias. He wanted the use of the papal army, and he wanted no trouble from the Vatican, but from now on there would be strict limits to how much he was willing to pay. And if he found Cesare more appealing than the other princes of Italy, he also understood that allowing Cesare to grow too strong could be a painfully costly mistake.
The king’s next actions followed from these premises. After months of ignoring Machiavelli and his fellow Florentine envoys, Louis suddenly announced not only that he was putting Florence under his protection but that he would assist it in bringing rebellious Pisa back under its control. Cesare is not likely to have been terribly disheartened to be told that Florence was now off limits. The city had never been more than a distantly long-term possibility for him, and the French king’s prohibition gave him an unarguable reason to refuse the demands of some of the condottieri he had hired for the Romagna campaign, especially the cousins Paolo and Giulio Orsini and Paolo’s son-in-law Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello. These men had blood connections to the Medici and profound contempt for the republican government that had sent the Medici into exile, and they had been pressing Cesare to begin his new impresa with an attack on Florence. They accepted this new proscription grudgingly, having no real interest in Cesare’s plans for the Romagna and feeling absolutely no loyalty to Cesare himself. Vitelli in particular was a worrisome character. Even more murderous than most warlords, but also one of the most skillful and experienced soldiers in Italy, he was consumed with hatred for the Florentine republic. He had made its destruction practically the central purpose of his life, and in pursuit of that goal he was constantly making trouble. He was not likely to stop doing so regardless of what the king of France had to say.
The great city of Bologna was more relevant to Cesare’s plans than Florence. Unlike Florence it was not separated from his possessions in the Romagna by the Apennine Mountains, with their dauntingly high passes, and its size and wealth and position at the northwestern terminus of the Via Emilia made it a perfect prospective capital for the principality he was in process of creating. He had in fact coveted Bologna since stopping there at the start of his first impresa in 1499 and seeing for the first time what an impressive place it was. Its resident tyrant, Giovanni Bentivoglio, saw the danger immediately. Louis XII and Cesare between them had broken one branch after another of his extended family. His wife was a Sforza, a cousin of Ludovico il Moro, Caterina thevirago, and Giovanni the displaced lord of Pesaro. One of his daughters was married to the Pandolfo Malatesta from whom Cesare had taken Rimini, and another was the mother of young Astorre Manfredi, still besieged at Faenza. Bentivoglio would have gone to his grandson’s assistance if not forbidden to do so by Louis XII.
Whatever plans Cesare may have had for advancing on Bologna had to be abandoned when Louis declared that he was taking it, like Florence, under his protection. This was another astute move by the French king. He turned not only Florence but now Bologna as well into client states, narrowing the options of the Borgias by doing so. Venice, if not nearly as dependent as Florence and Bologna, was also not a problem: it remained in no position to risk offending France. The Venetian signoria considered itself fortunate to have been allowed a share of the spoils from Louis’s conquest of Milan in spite of having contributed little to the success of his campaign. It knew that the king could strip it of its winnings whenever he chose. Fear of France had obliged Venice to yield without complaint when Cesare moved against Pesaro and Rimini, though it had long regarded both cities as within its rightful sphere of influence, Louis having made it known that he would not be pleased by an attempt to defend either place.
Milan, Florence, Bologna, Venice: four of the most important entities in northern Italy, and all now either belonging to Louis or obliged to do his bidding. And all, in consequence, were now closed to the Borgias, as was Naples as well. Alexander and Cesare, unless they resigned themselves to settling for the status quo, were going to have to work around them.
Background
VENICE, SERENE NO MORE
IT IS A MARK OF HOW GREATLY THE REPUBLIC OF VENICE DIFFERED from Italy’s other major city-states that it alone produced neither a legendary dynasty—scarcely a dynasty of any kind, actually—nor a single leader whose name anyone not a specialist in Italian history would be likely to recognize.
Florence had its Medici, Milan its Visconti and Sforza dukes, Naples the improbably varied monarchs of the House of Aragon, and Rome the immortally notorious Renaissance popes—fabled figures all. But these epic figures had no counterparts in Venice, which nevertheless, in the course of centuries of practically anonymous collective leadership, turned itself into a power as important as any in Europe or the Mediterranean world.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that whereas Naples and Milan—never mind Rome—had histories reaching back millennia, and Florence was a creation of the Roman Empire, Venice didn’t even come into existence until after the empire collapsed. The fall of Rome in fact led almost directly to the founding of Venice—to its profoundly unpromising beginnings in a place where, under ordinary circumstances, no one could ever have wanted to live. It was in the fifth century, with Vandals and Goths and Huns bringing mayhem down out of the north, that a scattering of refugees found themselves driven by desperation to settle on a cluster of tiny islands and barren mudflats in a remote lagoon near the northwesternmost corner of Italy’s Adriatic coast.
Against all odds, this turned out to be a brilliant choice, one that would not only make those first settlers safe but bring their descendants fabulous wealth and power. The first Venetians, in sole possession of the secret of how to thread through the shallows of the lagoon and reach their islands, found themselves to be untouchable as new waves of invaders—Ostrogoths, Lombards—took their turns at pillaging Italy. The islanders supported themselves first with fishing, then with trade on a petty scale. They increased their security by putting themselves under the protection of nearby Ravenna, then the principal Italian outpost of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Venice remained obscure for centuries, but its improbable location kept it free of the most destructive conflicts of the time. Meanwhile its seafaring traders were growing in experience, expanding their markets and becoming rich. They avoided entanglement with either Constantinople or the new western empire of Charlemagne, who gave up on capturing Venice after two failed attempts. Later they were able to stay clear of the long, debilitating fight between the popes and German emperors. By early in the eleventh century Venice was emerging as what it would remain for centuries, the hub of a commercial network the spokes of which reached not only into the Greek Christian Empire but into the lands of the Slavs, Turks, and Arabs. Its galleys became the means by which the peoples of the Mediterranean traded such staples as grain, wine, salt, wool, and cloth. By venturing to Egypt, Syria, and the ports of the Black Sea, they procured for Europe the exotic (and stunningly profitable) produce of India, China, and Southeast Asia. The soldiers they carried made Venice mistress of the east coast of the Adriatic, less out of any hunger for conquest than because territory so close to the city’s shipping lanes could not be allowed to fall into unfriendly hands.
Constantinople, simultaneously a trading partner and a rival, was crucial to Venice’s development. In the 1080s, as a reward for using its fleet to save the Eastern emperor from an invasion by the Normans of Sicily, Venice was granted an exemption from Constantinople’s excise tax. This gave it a much-resented advantage over its competitors Pisa and Genoa. At the start of the thirteenth century, by providing the transportation that made it possible for the knights of the Fourth Crusade to fall upon Constantinople and sack it without mercy, Venice helped weaken the Eastern emperors so gravely that they never entirely recovered. This would prove, eventually, to have been a terrible mistake, removing the prime obstacle to expansion by far more dangerous rivals. The worst of its consequences, however, would not become clear until the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453. In the interim the Venetians were masters of world trade, using their immense profits to raise up a city as beautiful as anything ever created by the hand of man. As for the price ultimately paid for the ruin of Constantinople, perhaps it is unfair to blame merchants for failing to see two and half centuries into the future.
From the beginning, the Venetians had embraced collective—republican—government, giving authority more often to committees and boards than to individuals. The leader or doge came to be elected, generally for life and by a process almost indescribably complex, and his freedom of action was so limited—he could not engage in trade, accept gifts, own property outside Venice, or even leave the city without permission—that the kind of autocracy that became the rule elsewhere in Italy remained impossible. Dynastic ambitions were cut off at their roots by rules prohibiting the sons of doges from holding office or even voting.
In the century following the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople, Venice’s government narrowed and hardened into an oligarchy. The city’s Great Council came to be restricted to elite families, and only council members could become magistrates or hold other important offices. Executive power passed from the doge, now little more than a ceremonial figurehead, to a central committee known as the Ten, or the Signoria. What resulted has often been depicted as oppressive and stultifying. If it was those things, it was also efficient, effective, and acceptable to the population, strikingly so in comparison with what was happening elsewhere.
The Venetians were a uniquely homogenous people, virtually everyone being either in business or dependent on business, and therefore their city was remarkably cohesive. Its hundred thousand residents remained placid across the generations, thanks to the general prosperity, the availability of “institutions of public utility” such as hospitals, and the absence of the kind of feudal nobility that in other places clashed with and tried to dominate the commercial classes. Even the satellite cities of Venice’s growing empire were dealt with generously and gave every evidence of being satisfied; this contrasts sharply with the experience of Florence, which was harsh in its treatment of the cities that came under its rule and was hated and occasionally rebelled against as a result. Not for nothing did Venice style itself La Serenissima—the Most Serene Republic. It saw itself as superior to other states, and in significant ways it was.
Neutrality came naturally to the Venetians; it was the sensible policy for a state whose prosperity depended on doing business with the whole world. It became progressively less feasible, however, as the fifteenth century advanced. First the aggression of the Visconti of Milan so alarmed the Venetians that they felt compelled to enter into an alliance with Florence, thereby being drawn into mainland politics as never before. Then the advance of the Ottoman Turks became a threat to the very survival of Venice’s overseas empire. The year 1463 brought a war with the Turks that would drag on for sixteen years and end on terms so unfavorable as to amount to an acknowledgment that the city was no longer capable of checking Ottoman expansion. The Most Serene Republic was serene no more. Thinking now that the only way of maintaining its security was to expand on the mainland, it launched the attack on the Este of Ferrara that turned into two more years of vicious warfare and produced no gains commensurate with the costs. The years following brought scattered successes, the annexation of Cyprus being the most noteworthy, but these were not sufficient to allay the Venetians’ pervasive sense that everything their forebears had built was in mortal peril. In the Europe beyond Italy, the unification of Spain and the resurgence of France were giving rise to two more powers that Venice could never hope to compete with. The world was beginning to pass it by.
This was the situation when Rodrigo Borgia became pope in 1492. It explains the Venetians’ quiet encouragement of Charles VIII’s invasion: they hoped he would help them expand into the Romagna. It also explains why, after joining the league that forced Charles to beat a retreat back to France, the Venetians struck out on their own once again, trying now to subdue Florence but finding themselves foiled by the stubborn resistance of Caterina Sforza in the Romagna and the outbreak of fresh fighting with the Turks. And why they next welcomed Louis XII into Italy, hoping that he could be maneuvered into pulling them out of their predicament.